Category Archives: Group on Faculty Development

All five goals of STFM’s strategic plan address innovation directly or indirectly, to varying degrees. The STFM 2013 Annual Report documents remarkable progress in innovation. Yet, most STFM members have had little or no training in developing innovations during their formal education. Furthermore, STFM’s achievements were made without developing any formal governance policies on open innovation.

Propose Faculty Development Programs on InnovationInnovation and leadership development are complementary and separate skill sets. We need faculty development programs for both skills sets, so that we can create an academic home to accelerate our organizational development.1 STFM needs a formalized and structured faculty development process to enhance our capabilities and capacities to develop innovations that build on our significant achievements. What if STFM considered the need for faculty development programs on open innovation to be as important as leadership development?

Foster Open InnovationTranslating this business concept to health care, open innovation involves:

Creating new processes, methods, programs, services and products through the collaborative and boundary-less exchange of ideas, between silos within and across organizations, communities, networks and systems2,3

At the STFM Annual Spring Conference this past May, there were no sessions specifically dedicated to attending in the hospital, despite the fact that our residents spend a significant portion of their training on the wards. In my program, residents spend 30% of their required rotational experiences doing inpatient medicine and night float. As faculty members we need to maximize this third of their residency, and STFM is an important place to capture and coordinate ways to achieve this.

How can we maximize the hospital experience? One strategy is to start with one of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Begin With the End in Mind. What do we want our residents to be able to do after they’ve completed their inpatient rotations?

As an experienced faculty developer, you’ve organized programs and taught research and teaching skills to new family medicine faculty for years. But have you stayed responsive and flexible—do you continue to show value in your department, institution, or community? This is a crucial time for faculty development to regain its momentum as a driving force for the value of family medicine.

For our faculty development staff, one way to show value has been to work in partnership with the community. Here are a few of the ways we’re adding value to community partnerships. The good news is that we’re using skill sets we already have.